Everything you need to know about the PS4 Slim

Gumtree.

It’s not quite the glamorous, headline-grabbing venue Sony will have wanted to reveal its upcoming slim-line PlayStation 4, yet an advert for a ‘PS4 Slim’ posted on the online marketplace is looking increasingly legitimate following another siting of the small console in the wild.

The video – initially uploaded to YouTube by ZRZ before being deleted and nudged over to Daily Motion – appears to depict a new PlayStation 4 Slim being unboxed in full, ‘borrowed’ from someone who had managed to get their hands on the console early. ZRZ explains in a recent post that Sony clamped down on the video for copyright reasons – so don’t expect the above unboxing to hang about.

Here’s what it what we know, in short:

• It’s smaller – quite a bit smaller – ditching the angular lines of the original PS4 model for a curved aesthetic not a million miles away from the curved PSOne reissued console.
• It’s got a 500GB hard drive.
• The controller has been tweaked, with a front-facing light bar.
• The packaging would suggest it’s compatible with PSVR, set to launch this October.
• It’s ready to roll: unless it’s an incredibly elaborate hoax, the packaging would suggest that this isn’t a Slim console that went missing from a production line, but a boxed, ready-to-hit-the-shelves console, set to be dispatched to shops in the near future. This would tie in with the date Sony has given for a PlayStation press conference on 7 September, suggesting that the Slim will be available shortly after the news event.

Microsoft has already released a smaller version of its own Xbox One; previous console iterations have followed the pattern of releasing smaller versions of a console once circuit boards and components can be made smaller without the risk of overheating.

For more on the Slim and the yet-to-be-seen ‘Neo’ – a more powerful version of the PS4already confirmed by Sony – we’ll have to wait until 7 September.